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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Review: Jeff Sharlet's C-Street

I just finished Jeff Sharlet’s follow-up to The Family. I’m sitting on a plane on my
way to Ireland
and I just devoured about half the book. While I don’t read much fiction
anymore because I find so little of it compelling, it still always amazes me
when a piece of nonfiction can be as or more gripping than a novel. Perhaps its
an old prejudice from younger days—kid’s nonfiction is a terrible genre—that I
have not managed to erase even after years of higher education. Even years in
which, possessed for a passion by various books or articles, my friends would
sit long hours debating into the night or call each other excitedly to find out
whether someone else had read the same passage. I remember one sleep deprived
semester planning to read only the first five pages of an article by – and
staying up to finish it. The same article caused two friends of mine, who had
spent the night in the classics lounge working and taking brief naps to
regenerate, to bound out to greet my professor, bouncing in excitement, before
our 8am class. Non-fiction certainly can
inspire, but my gut tells me that it usually doesn't.

I may not
be jumping up-and-down—I’m pretty sure that I would get chastised by the flight
attendants—but I have to say that this book not just appealed to me but it
impassioned me. After 2 hours of sleep, 1 hour of airport delay, and 3 hours of
flying, I’m still writing this review and that in itself should speak volumes.
This book is wild.

Back in the
days of the John Ensign and Mark Sanford scandals I became very interested in C-Street.
I heard Jeff Sharlet speaking on the Rachel Maddow show and I instantly wanted
to buy his book. What appealed to me was not the hypocrisy of a Christian
movement that hid and even helped the adultery of its adherents and leaders,
but that a group of prominent officials could create a fundamentalist prayer
cell meant to alter the way that they did government work in a country under
the first amendment.

Perhaps
even more, I was intrigued because I had come up with a similar idea for a
novel. I was reading some Greek texts by one of the oligarchists—Xenephon,
maybe, or Heraclitus, I don’t remember—and I came up with an idea about a
modern oligarchic movement. Thinking back to the political writings of Chomsky
that I read when I was in high school and the takeover of the democratic system
by elites who manipulated the media and electoral process for their own
undemocratic ends, I considered what would happen if this idea was taken
wide-scale. I thought to myself, what if a group secretly began placing a
number of crypto-conservatives into powerful positions in government and
companies around the world preparing for an eventual takeover and essentially
conservative revolution (however much of an oxymoron that idea might e). But my
idea wasn’t compelling—conservatives, at least how it exists in the United States
today does not inspire the devotion for a secret brotherhood like that. Then,
right on television, Jeff Sharlet articulated the missing link: fundamentalism.

The Family
is a fundamentalist Christian fellowship that does precisely that—they
infiltrate the highest positions in government and other powerful institutions
in order to network and spread their agenda. At first, it seemed like it
couldn’t be true, but after vague and evasive quotes from members of the
organization, I finally realized that it was absolutely true. I read The Family last year and I really
enjoyed it. The exploration of the topic was deft and provided the necessary
facts while giving an objective—sometimes unnervingly so—account of the
operation.

The
problem, however, with The Family, is
that it got bogged down. Sharlet, wanting to give the full history of this
insidious institution in American politics got bogged down in the details. Too
many of the founders were striking men with blond hair and blue eyes described
in almost exactly the same words. While one can’t change history to make it
more varied, one can attempt to couch one’s narrative differently in order to
keep reader interest. While I found the book fascinating, it didn’t stick as
well as I would have liked in my memory and I didn’t pursue my research
farther.

One day,
browsing on Amazon, I noticed that Jeff Sharlet wrote another book. I put it on
my Amazon wishlist, but I didn’t pay it as much heed as I might have. I was
more interested in this book because it was called C-Street and so, I assumed, it would focus on the political aspects
of the movement and the way in which the C-Streeters influenced American
policy. He delivered. This book is an amazing chronicle of the way in which the
fundamentalist contingent—specifically the family—influence American
policymaking both foreign and domestic. The group’s influence runs even deeper
than I anticipated and their issues are those which now appear on the forefront
of America’s
social battles: abortion, women’s rights, and homosexuality.

This book
is magnificently written. Sharlet divides it into chapters based on the
Family’s principles and each section blends politics, history, and interview.
It’s gripping. Perhaps, in some sense, I have fallen prey to what Sharlet calls
the problem of the American attention span. He argues that people are much more
interested in sex scandals than they are in the family’s support of genocidal
regimes. It did indeed take the Ensign and Sanford cases to bring C-Street to
my attention. However, I hope that I have proven myself a more worthy reader
than that. I found the chapter entitled “The War” to be the most engaging and
almost as terrifying as the sections on the Ugandan kill-the-gays bill and on
foreign policy more generally. “The War” detailed the rise of fundamentalism in
the American military. The combination of superiors using their position to
indoctrinate servicemen and the anti-Semitism detailed in this chapter was
absolutely shocking. You have to read it to believe it.

Ultimately,
I think this book was fantastic and that everyone everywhere should read it.
The idea of Christian evangelicalism using government positions and advocating
on blatantly elitist principles—they refer to these people as the
“up-and-out”—is something that should be investigated and brought to the
forefront of the public consciousness, especially since the American taxpayer
is paying for a lot of the trips during which senators attempt to
evangelicalize leaders of other nations—especially the poor and corrupt—is
something everyone needs to ponder. Also, the writing is concise and powerful.

I’m
planning on reading The Family again. Maybe on the flight home. I think I'm going to try to sleep on this next leg of the flight.

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